GONZÁLEZ
El Legado
Francisco Gonzalez Jr. is a big guy. He is sat behind a big desk in a big office built from mosaic stones and stained glass. Crystal bottles of tequila are dotted around the place and oil paintings of agave fields by the Jaliscan artist Marco Anibal hang on the walls. Behind him is a huge window that looks down on to rows of barrels filled with maturing tequila. A family photo on the shelf shows three generations of men and boys, all sat in this very office and, like a scene from Dallas, all in button-down shirts, jeans and cowboy hats.
Three leather chairs are in front of his desk and up until very recently they were empty. We are over an hour late arriving here after acquiring a puncture from an altercation with a particularly deep pot-hole during the two-hour drive from the Tequila Valley to where we are sat now, just outside the town of Atotonilco in Los Altos.
There are two distinct areas of Jalisco that dominate tequila production, the first being west of Guadalajara in the Tequila Valley, near the Tequila Volcano and around the towns of El Arenal and Amatitán and of course the town of Tequila itself. But if you head east of Guadalajara, to the eastern edge of the state, you arrive in Los Altos (The Highlands). In the past this was where agave was grown rather than distilled, but the balance of production has also been rapidly shifting further in this direction over the past few decades. This is evident in both the number of distilleries here and the average size of those distilleries. One only needs to notice (and it is hard not to) the billboard advertising and branding plastered over the frontage of bars and licorerías (liquor stores) to appreciate the familiar names that have grown up around here: Cazadores, Patrón, El Jimador, Espolon - all regular entrants into the world's top 10 tequila sellers.
During our drive in we encountered the biggest billboard of them all. At a scale like something you would see on the Las Vegas strip, with flowing calligraphic script it read "El Tierra de Don Julio". In front was the wizened old face of a Panama hat-wearing Don Julio Gonzalez, gazing out across the blue fields of Los Altos.
The man sitting in front of us now is his grandson.
"We have more than 100 years in the business," says Francisco as we take our seats. "The first tequila distillery out of Tequila Valley was established by my great-grandfather in a ranchera called El Salvador between Atotonilco and Tepatitlán. So my grandfather, Don Julio Gonzalez, was born and raised in a tequila distillery."
Julio's family were poor, as tequila wasn't very popular at the time. And living on an inaccessible hilltop meant it was hard for him to attend school, so his mother, who was a teacher, educated him at home. At 14, his father died, forcing him to start working in the distillery, which was now run by his uncle. One day, he was invited to transport tequila barrels by mule at night from the distillery to Atotonilco. From there, the barrels were taken by train to Ocotlán, an important commercial hub near Lake Chapala (Mexico's largest freshwater lake, to the southeast of Guadalajara), and then on to Mexico City. This was a tax-evasion strategy and the clandestine operation continued until he was caught one night by the police. He spent a night in jail and paid the bail with his gun. After his release, at 17, he asked a wealthy friend of his late father for a loan of 20,000 pesos to start his own business. He persisted for months until the man finally agreed. With this money, he opened his first tequila distillery. The year was 1942 and he was still just 17.
His main brand, 3 Magueyes, was launched in 1952 and enjoyed great success at the budget end of the Mexican market. Don Julio built his business, like everyone else, making mixto tequila, where a portion of sugar from cane was added to the agave at fermentation to bulk out the product. But in 1975 he began producing a limited quantity of 100% agave tequila strictly for consumption at family gatherings and as gifts for friends. He put it in short bottles so as not to obscure the view of guests across the dining table.
"By the 1980s he was the second or third biggest producer in the industry," says Francisco. "But in 1985 he had five strokes in a row and could no longer go on working. At age 60 he retired and my father and uncle began running the distillery."
The brothers were worried their father wouldn't be around much longer, so to celebrate his life in 1987, they launched Don Julio's 100% agave tequila recipe and named it after him. Tequila was still struggling to shake its reputation as a lower-class drink back then and wealthy folks who wouldn't admit to drinking it would often hide it under the table and prefer to be seen with whiskey, cognac or brandy. Francisco Sr. didn't want his father's name on a tequila brand that people were embarrassed to drink so he decided to create a new market and sell it as the most expensive tequila available, pricing it at double the cost of the priciest tequila at the time.
Don Julio thought he was crazy for trying to sell tequila at the price of whiskey or cognac but it worked. Don Julio became the first super-premium tequila brand in the Mexican market.
"So we didn't just change the history of the family," Francisco tells us. "It changed the history of the whole tequila industry."
In 1999 the Canadian spirits behemoth Seagram's invested an undisclosed sum in Don Julio, buying out the Gonzalez family. Seagram's were moving into the entertainment industry at the time, however, and the following year they sold all of their distilling and spirits brand assets for $8bn (£6bn) to the British spirits company Diageo and the French company Pernod Ricard. Don Julio went to Diageo and, possibly a little unsure about what to do with a tequila brand, Diageo invited Juan Beckmann from Joes Cuervo to buy into a 50% partnership with them. At that point Don Julio was selling around 300,000 cases a year. Jump forward to 2014 and sales of Don Julio had increased by a factor of three. At this point, Diageo agreed to a deal to swap their Bushmills distillery in Northern Ireland for Jose Cuervo's stake in Don Julio plus $408m (£315m). Given the million or so casks of whisky that was included in the sale, the deal was worth more than $3bn (£2.3bn) to Beckmann.
Under 100% Diageo ownership, Don Julio has continued to thrive, and in 2023 the brand sold 3.4 million cases, making it the second-biggest tequila brand in the world after Jose Cuervo.
I had the great fortune to visit Don Julio's Destilería La Primavera back in 2009. I fondly remember a very enlightening tasting with the brand's master distiller Enrique De Colsa. By that point La Primavera was already big and no doubt quite different to the place that Francisco and his brothers had kicked a football around as kids in the 1990s. Nevertheless, it maintained its brick ovens and pot stills and turned out an excellent tequila. Today, it is an absolute monster of an operation and Pancho says it's practically impossible to get tours in there. I worry that whatever they are hiding behind the walls of La Primavera today is both the secret to its massive production volume and the cause of its noticeable drop in quality over the past decade.
After the Gonzalezes sold to Seagram's they had a non-compete agreement so they sat patiently on their hands for a few years. In 2004 they got to work and began developing a new distillery on the land where their summer holiday home had once been situated. This was also around the same time that Francisco Jr. came into the business at the age of 15.
"The idea was to come back to the industry not with a distillery," says Francisco. "But with a sanctuary for the tequila in order to honour the beverage, the industry, the business that has given so much to the family, to the town, to the region."
The result is Casa de Los González, which is truly one of the most remarkable distilleries in Jalisco. In most tequila distilleries it's common to see pools of mystery liquids on cracked concrete floors, wheelbarrows of vegetal matter being pushed around, or steam blasting out of various orifices and dogs trailing around the place. But as Francisco takes us on a tour through his distillery it has more of the feel of a grand hotel lobby or museum than a place where agaves are turned into spirit.
High vaulted ceilings are supported by thick stone walls and huge stained-glass windows depict turquoise agave pencas and red soil, their designs painted by Francisco's mother. The floor is polished marble with a giant agave inset in a contrasting tone, almost too big to appreciate from the height of an average human's field of vision. It is a literal palace of tequila production.
The Gonzalez family's journey has taken them from humble origins to tequila royalty. Luxurious interiors and artisanal craftsmanship now elevate the spirit once hidden under dinner tables, redefining premium tequila for a new generation of connoisseurs.
This is not a distillery that is open to tours, so the architecture serves a purpose beyond aesthetics. Behind the sheen of the polished floor, the flow of production has been meticulously thought out, and engineered using Italian-manufactured equipment. The level of cleanliness is borderline obsessive, where even the brick ovens, which in any other distillery are normally caked with the residue of a thousand...
